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No community can end homelessness of any kind without comprehensive, real-time, person-specific data on the problem. This has emerged as a gospel tenet of our work.
But it wasn’t always this way.
The federal government requires communities to collect data on homelessness on one night in January each year. Data is then extrapolated from these counts to create national estimates of homelessness. In 2015, when we began our work, we analyzed current and historical local point in time data to calculate projected inflow and outflow over the course of a year. We used that information to set monthly housing targets that would put each community on a path to zero. By the end of the first year, more than 20 communities had hit their targets and should have ended veteran homelessness. In reality, only one community had achieved a measurable zero.
We had stumbled into a critical data problem. Solving it would be crucial to our success and to the success of each local community.